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People smugglers: the latter day slave merchants

2014-09-30

It has been a truly disastrous year for irregular migrants
attempting the perilous sea-crossing from North Africa to Europe. A troubling
spike in serious armed conflicts around the world, from Mali in West Africa
through to Gaza, Syria, Iraq and beyond, has proved a bonanza for the people
smugglers – with strife-torn Libya now by far the most favoured point of
departure.

The figures are staggering. Over 160,000 irregular migrants have
made it to Europe so far this year: more than double the number for the previous
record in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring. And 80 per cent of these are
arriving at the same point on the EU’s external frontier: southern Italy, via
the central Mediterranean.

It is the Italian navy that has born the brunt of the surge. Their
‘Mare Nostrum’ operation, launched last October following a shipwreck off the
island of Lampedusa that claimed over 300 lives, has so far rescued an
estimated 130,000 people at sea. But at least 3,000 others have died in the
crossing attempt: five times as many as in 2013, according to the United
Nations Refugee Agency. The central Mediterranean route, say analysts, has
become more dangerous for migrants than ever before.

The main reason is the people-smugglers who, driven on by the
vast profits to be made from this sorry industry, are becoming ever more brutal
in their modus operandi. In early September off the coast of Malta, it is
alleged that a boat was deliberately rammed when its passengers – a mix of
Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Sudanese – refused to transfer on to
smaller vessels. Some 500 people drowned.

The tragedy illustrates a change of tactic by the smugglers over
the past year. Since the launch of Mare Nostrum, they know there is a good
chance that the migrants will be rescued soon after embarkation – in some
cases, as little as 40 miles from the Libyan coast. As a consequence they are
increasingly using boats that they know are too small or unseaworthy to reach
Europe. But the Mediterranean is a big sea. The Italians are patrolling an area
580 miles wide by 50 deep, in which it is all too easy to miss a tiny dinghy weighed
down with migrants, above all at night. The consequences are as inevitable as
they are disastrous.

Frontex analysts say that the level of professionalism they are witnessing
is something new, and a direct result of the vast profits to be made. “Smugglers
are ruthless criminals who play with human lives,” says Antonio Saccone, Head
of Operational Analysis.

Some
migrants, notably middle-class refugees from the
war in Syria, are willing to pay up 2,000 Euros for a place aboard. The value
to the smugglers of one recently intercepted boat, which contained 450 people,
was calculated at 1m Euros. In order to increase profits, the migrants are
generally packed in as tightly as possible, which naturally leads to
overloading and a greatly increased risk of capsize.

Testimony gathered by Frontex debriefers, who interview arriving
migrants in order to gain intelligence about the smugglers, points to great
suffering aboard the boats. To maintain order on unstable vessels, passengers
moving about without permission are typically beaten or, in one case in July,
stabbed to death. Others have simply been thrown overboard. There are seldom
any lifejackets as these are bulky, and take up space that would otherwise be
occupied by paying customers.

Migrants from the sub-Sahara are treated worst of all. In a disturbing
echo of practices on 19th century slaving ships, black Africans are
routinely locked down on the very bottom deck, with few exceptions made for
women, children or the elderly. Cases of asphyxiation by exhaust fumes have been
recorded.

The absence of the rule of law in Libya since the fall of
Gaddafi appears to have created near-perfect operating conditions for the
criminal gangs. By accident of geography, the country was a popular jumping off
point for Europe-bound migrants long before 2011. As a comparatively rich Muslim
nation, Libya was a destination country in its own right for workers from
around the world. Many of these, still resident in Libya, have found new work as
‘recruiters,’ liaising between the Libyan-controlled criminal gangs and
would-be migrants pouring in to the city.

Tripoli has become such a magnet for irregular migrants that
those with money now regularly fly there to try their luck, even from as far
away as Istanbul. The journeys of the poorer incomers, by contrast, can be epic.
Some take as long as two years to reach the Libyan coast, working their passage
for a pittance, often walking for large parts of way. Groups of corpses have
been discovered far out in the Sahara, in mute and grisly illustration of their
desperation and determination to reach Europe.

The tentacles of the gangs stretch deep into the Libyan
interior. Frontex analysts have identified two principle overland routes to Tripoli.
The eastern one, leading from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan towards Al
Kufrah in the eastern Libyan Desert, is the most highly organized. The western
route, from Mali, Nigeria and Niger up to Tripoli via Qatrun and Sabha, is more
informal. In both cases, however, the Libyan leg of the journey is jealously
controlled by local militiamen, whose ranks have been swollen by former
soldiers in the Gaddafi regime.

With a minimum of 4,000 people attempting the voyage from Libya every
week, the logistical challenges onshore are considerable. The migrants must be
fed and sheltered while awaiting their departure from beach-heads 50km to the
east and west of the capital or, increasingly, from Benghazi. The smugglers
corral them in ruined buildings, private accommodation, hotels. The mobile
phone footage of one successful migrant revealed that he had stayed in a
hangar-like building, probably on an ex-military base, that was the temporary
home of hundreds of people.

At 9 million Euro a month, the Italian Search and Rescue operation
does not come cheap. UNHCR and others have backed Rome’s calls for the burden
to be shared more widely among Italy’s EU partners. Frontex’s Antonio Saccone
thinks what is really needed is a partner organization in Libya that might
tackle the smuggler gangs onshore, as happens in countries like Morocco and
Senegal. But there is little prospect of such an arrangement with Tripoli,
given the ongoing civil chaos there; and with the military crises in the Middle
East continuing to deepen, the migrant tide in the central Mediterranean looks
certain to go on rising.